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St
Edmund, Forncett End

Forncett St Peter and Forncett St
Mary are two sprawling parishes to the south-west of
Norwich, but their churches were well away from the main
road which runs through the extreme west of the parish,
and so in those bullish days at the start of the 20th
century a chapel of ease was built here, dedicated to St
Edmund. A plaque on the side of the building declares, in
the High Anglican style, that it was dedicated on St
Peter's Day, June 29th 1904.

It was
never finished. The red-brick chapel, in that elegant
Tudor-bethan style beloved of the Edwardians, has a
boarded-up east end where the chancel should have been.
It will never be built now, but the wood boarding has
obviously been renewed over the years, perhaps several
times. Without a chancel to balance it, the bell-gabled
porch at the west end looks rather clumsy. The lady on
duty on bike ride day seemed to think that a tower had
been planned for this end, but I can't see that the form
of the nave, as it stands, could have allowed a tower to
be built against it.

The
windows are the typically pretty triple-bay affairs
familiar from a thousand Edwardian office buildings,
shops and pubs. Similarly, there is nothing remarkable
about the interior, apart from a very pleasing and
idiosyncratic font in the north-west corner, and some
good Victorian furnishings in the sanctuary. These are,
of course, older than the church, but they probably came
here from Forncett St mary church, which was declared
redundant almost thirty years ago.